the blog eclectic

All the world's a blog
And all the men and women merely bloggers.....
--As You Like It, Act II Scene 7

Contact:
eclectic@rigoletto.com

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Friends don't let friends...

Apparently, the primary concern of a friend is to keep his friends
from doing the wrong things (sometimes known as "falling into
error"). This seems to be a deep-rooted duty in our culture; a Google
search for the phrase "friends don't let friends" returns over
21,000 hits. Many of these are bound to be duplicates, but that
still leaves a lot of things to keep friendwatchers busy.

The range of things to watch out for covers just about everything,
from the sublime to the ridiculous, profound to silly, serious to
whimsical. This is a collection of Web sites dealing with this
crucial issue.

I don't know when the term originated, but I suspect that "...drive
drunk" is one of the earliest.

Almost all of these sayings are epigrammatic, and many make their
way onto bumper stickers and T-shirts. I sometimes wonder about the
advisability - or propriety - of proclaiming your views,
sandwich-board-like, on your clothes. Did Jefferson have a T-shirt
that said "I am a Jeffersonian Democrat"?

To save space, I've left out the string "friends don't let friends"
in the links below. When you read them, be sure to add
the "don't" back in, otherwise, you're likely to end up doing all
sorts of wrong things. This will probably get you a lot of
attention, not necessarily appreciated, from your friends.

Also, a few headlines appear in more than one category.

Disclaimer: Inclusion of sites in this list does not imply either my
endorsement or disapproval.

There are a lot of links here. That is, after all, the point. Some
of them are bound to be so fascinating that you're likely to wander off,
and may end up gone for days. That is, after all, the point of the Web.

The List

Many sites deal with computers, and what you should or shouldn't use.
Some of them are pretty esoteric.
When there are many sites with the same philosophy, the number of sites
is in parentheses after the title.

Does anybody type on a noncomputer keyboard these days?
These sites promote the Dvorak keyboard, but
there's a recent
article (reported on Slashdot)
that tells how Peter Klausler found an even better layout, using a
neural network algorithm and a few million words of online text.

There's a major article
in Fortune about the dark side of PowerPoint. And
here's one
from ZDNet News, about the Pentagon's take on "a growing electronic
menace: the PowerPoint briefing".
The Fortune article has an example of how not to use PowerPoint: the Gettysburg Address, if
Lincoln had had our advantages.

Those two seem to have the bases covered. Nobody seems interested in
keeping their friends from voting Libertarian or Independent. Like
the Ford/Chevy split, Democrats seem to be more outspoken than
Republicans.

On the serious side, there are the friends who don't want their
friends to hurt anyone:

(Notice the TM symbol. He's a lawyer. Say no more.)
This guy does not advocate drunk driving. But, the consequences can
be quite harsh, and as there are always borderline cases, he maintains
that if you do go there, you'll need the best defense money can buy.
Either way, it's going to cost you a bundle.

Then there are the odd ones, some serious, some not, that just don't
fit into the broad categories:

Notes

I found this in a signature line on a message board posting. It is
attributed to Kevin Harris.
su is the Unix command that gives you full control over a
computer. Once you successfully su, it and all its files are
yours. If you're drunk, you might suffer a momentary lapse of
judgement, and delete all the files. I'm told that this happens, but
rarely.
The (1) indicates the section of the Reference Manual that describes
su, and it's probably unnecessary, as su only appears in
one section. The (1) does make it clear that we're talking about Unix.

Reveal codes
are little formatting codes used by most word processors to specify how
a document is formatted: paragraph breaks, lists, numbered sections,
etc. Word thoughtfully hides these from you, which can be annoying at
times. If you're revising a long, complicated document, it's a lot
easier if you can see the codes on the screen. That entry is by a
lawyer, which is interesting because there was once a very good word
processing program, XyWrite (this was in
the Old Days, when companies other than Microsoft were allowed to write
applications). It was much used by the legal profession, and one of the
function keys let you toggle the reveal codes on and off.

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Monday, April 08, 2002

WORDS

Words are the bricks and mortar with which we build our sites.
The key thing about people who like to write is, that they like to write.
If Hougton-Mifflin won't buy their work, and the New Yorker won't print it,
that's OK - they'll write anyway, and put it up on this, the world's
biggest town square bulletin board.

As in all human endeavors, some
are better than others. In this corner, I'll try to point out what I think
is "good writing". This is partly a subjective issue - there's no one
standard of "good writing", at least not as far as the words themselves,
taken individually, like links on a chain.

What sets good writing
apart from the rest, is the expression of ideas, the construction and
layout of a good, convincing argument, the marshalling of facts to support
a stance. When good ideas are handicapped by bad grammar and spelling,
there's a problem. Readers have to trip over debris to get at the ideas.

MINING FOR GOLD

There may be a count of active blogs; I'd guess
somewhere around 100,000. A Google search for "blog" shows 823,000;
"weblog", 992,000. MIT's Blogdex shows 14,214 sites and 1,092,797 links.
(In proofreading, a day later, the Google "blog" count went up to 859,000;
'weblog", to 1,050,000. I'll check back in a week or so.)

Probably not more
than a handful of us read all of them. There's probably a parallel between
blogs and specialty-interest magazines. The last time I looked, there were
about 10,000 specialty-interest magazines, most with small circulations
and dedicated readers. Many great bloggers go for months with fewer than
100 readers. More than once or twice recently, I've read bloggers write,
"Wow! Where did all those hits come from?". In at least one case, he
followed up and found out:
The Tipping Blog.

There seems to be a
dozen or so people now whose blogs have attracted significant attention
(and that number is most likely off by a factor of 10 or so (which isn't
at all bad in cosmology)). You know who you are; you know who they are.
I'll put in links, and I'll tell why I think they're good writers. (I
don't want people to get the idea that I'm linking to good sites so I
can bask in their sunshine, and pull in a few links myself.) If I don't
mention somebody's site, it's just because I haven't seen it yet, or haven't
read enough to make a call. (As if anybody would be depressed if this
uppity newcomer didn't gush over their site.)

Some, like
Andrew Sullivan and John Derbyshire, are working journalists whose business -
and life - is writing. Others, like
asparagirl
and
The Last Page
work in
other fields. (IT seems to be a good source of bloggers.) But they all
write, most because they want to, a few because they're driven to.

My first example of "good writing" comes from John Derbyshire. This
appeared in his NRO review of
The Time Machine:

The best
reason to watch this latest version of The Time Machine is 19-year-old
Zambian-Irish (no kidding) pop-tart Samantha Mumba, who is exceptionally
easy on the eye.

I like that one because in an imaginative use
of a single word, a single image (pop-tart: breakfast-food concoction by
Kellogg, designed to be popped out of a toaster, from "tart: n. A pastry
shell with shallow sides, no top crust, and any of various fillings"),
he categorizes a popular singer/actress. (I'm certain Ms Mumba
would not be amused by that label, but it is the sort of thing that goes
with the territory.) At least, JD doesn't stoop to the despicable levels
of Chrstopher Hitchens - the Oscar Wilde-turned-Darth Maul.

Sunday, April 07, 2002

LAST WEEK'S LOGGINGS

WSJ 4/5/02

Korean Airlines flight crews get Tasers. They've already gone through
martial arts training. UAL is said to have bought 1300 Tasers, but the
FAA hasn't approved their use.

Washington Post 4/5/02

Argenbright is out of almost all US airports. In the Washington area,
they're replaced by Globe Aviation Services. We can all feel safer now
- except that almost all of Argenbright's laid-off screeners are
applying for jobs at Globe.

Washington Post 4/5/02

The air space around the White House, the Capitol Building and the Naval
Observatory [note 1] is a Prohibited Area for all aircraft. Since 9/11,
airplanes have drifted into this space almost 600 times - about 3 times
a day.

[Note 1: The Naval Observatory is the traditional home of the Vice
President. There are 4 other areas: 2) The Bush ranch in Texas 3) the Bush
home in Maine 4) the nuclear plant in Amarillo, TX (thanks, guys - it's
nice to finally know where that one is), and 5) George Washington's home
in Mt. Vernon. (Well, maybe it's hard for him to sleep with all that
noise).

Reuters 4/4/02

China's space program: Shenzhou III launched March 2002; astronauts
early this century (by 2005); a manned space station soon; Beijing
builds a space industry, aiming for a manned moon mission.

Times of London 4/4/02

The EU imposes a "green tax" of up to 50 pounds ($65) on London-LAX
flights. Norway imposes a CO2 tax on all their flights.

Houston Chronicle 3/15/02

Russia pumps up the space tourism industry: They're aiming for 2005.
Trips are expected to cost about $98,000, which buys you a 60 to 90
minute flight that gets you 63 miles up (probably a conversion of the
Russian's 100 km), where for about 5 minutes you'll be weightless and extremely
airsick.

The government of North Rhine-Westphalia is trying to counter the
mad-cow scare. They figure that farmers can improve the quality of their
pork by improving their quality of life.

In typical German fashion,
they proclaimed a decree (not just a guideline)which says, in part:

A pig should get one square meter of stall space and a
straw or soft rubber mat for napping. When it's time to play, the pigs
must have chains or chewy toys on hand. "Balls also can be made available
to the pigs for activity material," the edict states. Each pig should get
at least eight hours of daylight. During the darker, shorter days of
winter, farmers must compensate with lamps. ... A farmer or farmhand must
spend at least 20 seconds looking at each pig each day -- and back up the
loving care with paperwork showing he has enough pighands to provide
quality time.

Needless to say, the farmers are Not Amused.

Later on in the story we see the source of this Great Plan:

For farmers, two women personify the threat: local
agricultural minister Baerbel Hoehn, who drafted the edict, and her
fellow Green Party member, Renate Kuenast, a spike-haired former lawyer
who runs Germany's national ministry for consumer protection, food and
agriculture. The Greens, who run the state and federal governments in
coalition with the Social Democrats, devised the local rules and have
attracted the farmers' ire. At a recent farmers' forum, bodyguards stood
by with umbrellas to shield the two ministers in the event of flying
produce.

Gotta watch out for those Social Democrats.

At a state-sponsored agricultural center, one engineer seems to have a
faint grip on reality:

"We can make all the rules in
the world," he says. "But the pigs sort out what they like for
themselves."